|
After several weeks immersed in Archeage I have to say that despite the really bad stuff people seem to be focused on in regards to hacks, there are some amazing MMO design elements in there that have incredible potential. This post is about one of those: Trade Packs Each zone in the game has a special crafting station where you combine a few farmed materials to form one of a couple different packs that is unique to that zone. This pack is carried on your back, you move like a snail when you're carrying one, and you get a nice flag on you that clearly says to anyone interested "here goes a loot piņata". You turn these packs in to special NPC traders for gold or other game items. These traders can be found in several zones around the world -- the longer you travel to get to one, the more your pack is worth. If a player kills you while you're carrying a pack, the pack is dropped and they, or anyone else, can pick it up and turn it in instead. For a pvp-centric game, this is a great mechanism. It enables open-world pvp by providing an incentive for players to put themselves at risk for better rewards, and it provides a reward for other players to go and hunt you down. I'm curious what other people who play think about the trade pack mechanism.
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2014 17:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:12 |
|
|
Young Freud posted:I'm fairly certain that the "skip to 90" option is more for returning players whose characters have been wiped from inactivity or veterans starting an alt on another server or faction than something for new players. I get that, but I don't see what's stopping bob newbie from buying the game and then buying a level 90 character off the bat, and I don't know of any major MMO that deletes characters for inactivity, let alone WoW, but that's besides the point. Pavlov posted:Let me first qualify this by saying that when I talked about getting all skills early, I was mostly thinking about class based MMOs. Classless MMOs, or ones where even end-game characters are only able to access a subset of the skills available to them have to function in ways reasonable to their specific systems. Okay, so thinking more about this, you're right, if you're an MMO veteran who already knows what they're looking for from a class (which is everyone in this thread so that makes debating this awkward) it does suck to not have access to all the cool stuff, especially with alts. Being able to go to the PvP area in GW2 and try out all of your class abilities was a really cool feature I forgot about, and like you said, was fantastic for seeing if you liked how a class played instead of playing for 10 hours before you realize it sucks. I also think GW2 at launch did an excellent job with skills and abilities, basically allowing you to pick and choose the skills you wanted as you leveled, as well as let you get your full skillset long before you hit the level cap. I would instead propose a system similar to GW2, but where skills aren't level gated or tied to a hierarchy, and as you level you can choose whatever skill available to your character (based on class) that you want. I actually think Champions Online does something like this, but they have a free form system where you're not restricted by class archetypes, but a lot of people just use the same cookie cutter builds despite this, because it's really easy to make an awful build. Regarding the player skill thing, I'm still a firm believer that most people won't learn to utilize all of their abilities if they are given all of them off the bat, but for argument's sake let's say it doesn't matter. So let's look at this from another angle. In lieu of abilities, what would be your ideal model of character progression be? Just jump right into the gear grind? Do you still quest for gold/gear/levels? Or would you primarily play through dungeons?
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2014 18:24
|
|
|
year199X posted:So let's look at this from another angle. In lieu of abilities, what would be your ideal model of character progression be? Just jump right into the gear grind? Do you still quest for gold/gear/levels? Or would you primarily play through dungeons? There's a fun question. First let me say that I'm not a proponent of the monolithic MMO. I feel that an MMO trying to cater to the whole MMO 'community' is only going to leave everyone mildly dissatisfied. I think that a series of smaller, more niche MMOs will leave more people happier in the end. I say this because I think my preferences would make a top of people unhappy. Second is that I tend to care less about progression, and more about goals. The difference is progression has you advancing along a set scale of some given metric, most of which can be summed up as getting 'stronger'. A goal, instead, is a discrete thing that you want to happen. They're related, and there's overlap, but also a lot of situation where they're separate. Anyway, MMOs serve a specific purpose for me, in that I specifically play them for content that requires groups of people. If I wanted to play a game solo, I'd play a single player game, which almost universally do single player content better. To me, good single player content in an MMO is almost always content directly related to or subservient to multiplayer/group content. Because of this, progression for me doesn't always have to be personal progression. Guild stuff is a staple for me. Guild drama is hilarious, and having the ability to gain and loose ground in various venues means that you don't need a treadmill to keep it interesting. The same applies for worlds/realms/races and all of that. Part of the reason I was drawn to GW2 was the tentative promise of not having a gear treadmill. I'll be honest, I like playing dress-up, and I was perfectly fine hoarding all my crafting mats for a month to get a slightly shinier sword. I like this kind of 'horizontal' progression. Part of this was that I got to choose the shinier sword I was aiming for. With a stat-gain treadmill you're doing it because the game demands better gear to access harder content, and your options are determined by a spreadsheet. Part of the reason I quit GW2 was that they introduced a higher tier of gear with minor but necessary bonuses that you had to grind up. I also like 'social' progression as well. Rankings and leader-boards and instance scores are examples of this. Some people might see this as insubstantial progression, but if you think about it, having arbitrarily high damage numbers is kind of insubstantial if enemy health scales by an equal amount. Changes to the gameworld are also good motivators. This is a situation where goals and progression are often separate. If someone gets to decide the color scheme for the capital city every week, people will fight tooth and nail over the privilege to make everything hot pink. There's no real progression here, but there's still a bunch of people spending their time to get something they want. And then there are cases where progression isn't necessary at all. People like hats in TF2, but people still played TF2 before there were hats. People didn't need loot drops to want to play the game; They played the game for its own sake. The persistent rewards are just a nice bonus that can show up at the end. This is a principle that I think a lot of MMOs seem to miss. If the content is fun in its own right, then the rewards and progression become less important. There is a lot of content in a lot of MMOs where, if that content gave no rewards, there would be no players going there. This is a big point for me, because if I stop and notice that I haven't actually enjoyed the activities I've been doing for the last 3 hours, I'm likely to put the game down and not pick it up again. TL;DR: Guild progression, pretty princess dressup, titles/competitive ranking, changing the gameworld, and actual fun.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2014 20:16
|
|
|
I think abilities are fine for character development, if they're tied to horizontal progression systems. Gain flexibility, not more power from new skills. Critical abilities for your character's performance should ideally come early and quickly, unlike the thing in WoW & Co. where your max-DPS priority consists of abilities A through H, but you only unlock G and H in the last levels before you reach the cap. There obviously are games like this already, those with decks (select X skills out of dozens/hundreds) or EVE to some extent. You don't even have to tie it to class, but if your MMO uses fixed classes feel free to, I guess. Prevent overwhelming new players by unlocking certain skills/skill groups with other character milestones (previous skills or builds, tutorials, storyline and quests, rewards for activities, etc. depending on your game) but let veterans beeline for them in some way. The Secret World eg. had a skill wheel in which progressing radially takes more and more points, so early skills come quickly and picking up new weapons' skills tangentially was easy, but getting all of them for maximum flexibility takes a while. Unfortunately TSW failed in addressing the pitfalls of such a system - having too many skills means they're both hard to balance and hard to make unique. TSW also has a lot of skills designed before key mechanics changed (eg. "proc on CC" skills now almost useless because CC was nerfed and got long cooldowns added during development), forces people to pick up a lot of weak or broken skills on the way to a good build. The worst part re: the discussion above is that guidance for newbies is very limited due to the plethora of skills and the discrepancies between concepts which look good on paper vs. those which actually work well with the game's sometimes unintuitive mechanics and stats. There are premade builds but most of them rely on outdated ideas of said "look good on paper" variety. On the other end other than "fill the skill wheel" veterans don't really have an incentive to pick up most of the expensive skills because they're useless, bad, or both. Still, some builds require many expensive skills (also high end gear) which don't have slightly weaker variants for lower "level" characters. It sort of defeats the purpose if you make "real builds" take 50 hours to complete, may as well keep character levels that unlock abilities at level X. I'd like to see a MMO that executes the deck concept competently. Because I'm really tired of the "excessive 50h levelling tutorial" stuff. Bonus points if your game locks other features beyond skills behind level and level-dependent story gates (FF14 is awful with this).
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 14:08
|
|
|
What about skill trees? I love skill trees, i.e.: http://irowiki.org/~himeyasha/skill4/hwz.html?10rKHXnndodqaffNHxhNfNqx Pick the skills you like, ignore the rest. Get new skills as you level up, but only get the skills that actually fit your play style. This also cuts down on stupid hotbar clutter, because there's no way you won't have every skill ever on your bars "just in case". There has to be a reset option somewhere though, making a whole new char because you picked up a skill you don't like, or want to try a different build is balls.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 15:41
|
|
|
I never played Archeage, but I've looked at the skill system there and I like the premise of it. Basically you pick three 'classes', then spend a limited amount of skill points picking the skills/passives you want from those classes. You can never have all the skills/passives from all three at a time though. I kind of like a GW2 style limited size action bar to solve the 'all skills on bar all the time' issue. They're especially fun when you have a large skill pool and have to make tough decisions. I feel like they need to have at least 10 slots though. I've seen games with like 8 slots max and it just seems so restricting.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 16:19
|
|
|
orcane posted:I'd like to see a MMO that executes the deck concept competently. Because I'm really tired of the "excessive 50h levelling tutorial" stuff. Bonus points if your game locks other features beyond skills behind level and level-dependent story gates (FF14 is awful with this). Wildstar, for all its sins, pretty much nails the deck thing. Everything is unlocked by level 30, and you usually have your core rotation online by level 20 or so (depending upon class). It's 30 skills to choose from competing for eight slots, so there is a lot of freedom to change your build on an encounter-by-encounter basis.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 16:24
|
|
|
But like you said, it only has 8 slots. To me that's not a deck, that's a hand. I never played the game myself, but from what I saw of it, it didn't really seem to leave much room for many situational skills on your bar. Some skills are pretty long cooldowns too, which looked like it left people with one kind of short-ish rotation cast over and over. In comparison GW2 gave me 15 slots. 10 from weapons which chained in different ways, 1 active heal, 3 medium cd situationals, and 1 long cd active. I still had a lot more skills in my pool than on my bar, but I felt like I had options within the bar I had.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 17:32
|
|
|
Pavlov posted:In comparison GW2 gave me 15 slots. 10 from weapons which chained in different ways, 1 active heal, 3 medium cd situationals, and 1 long cd active. I still had a lot more skills in my pool than on my bar, but I felt like I had options within the bar I had. I think this comes down to a difference in preference. I always found GW2's skill setup to be way too large, given the speed at which combat happened and the rate at which you were expected to spam your skills. 8 slots that you can change on a fight-by-fight basis felt large enough to incorporate the core skills plus a few utilities, but small enough that I always felt I had to make a trade off between, say, group healing or cleansing, or AoE damage versus survivability, etc.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 17:47
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:I think this comes down to a difference in preference. I always found GW2's skill setup to be way too large, given the speed at which combat happened and the rate at which you were expected to spam your skills. Most people that played Wildstar didn't find macroing all your DPS options into 2 buttons to be engaging gameplay either. Unless you're doing sPVP you really don't have to be on the quick draw with all 15 skills or even press them that much. Most PVE builds remove pretty much all the complexity in favor of pure DPS and are really easy to play. The tradeoff you're talking about is 100% relevant to GW2 also as different weapons specialize in different things. If you're playing a Mesmer it's keyboard piano land, but otherwise I found the classes to be really simple to pick up even hopping straight into PVP and using everything from the start.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 18:50
|
|
|
Thunderbro posted:Most people that played Wildstar didn't find macroing all your DPS options into 2 buttons to be engaging gameplay either. Unless you're doing sPVP you really don't have to be on the quick draw with all 15 skills or even press them that much. Most PVE builds remove pretty much all the complexity in favor of pure DPS and are really easy to play. The tradeoff you're talking about is 100% relevant to GW2 also as different weapons specialize in different things. If you're playing a Mesmer it's keyboard piano land, but otherwise I found the classes to be really simple to pick up even hopping straight into PVP and using everything from the start. I may have had a bad experience with the engineer then. Weapon slots, plus utility spots, plus belt swaps.....I felt completely overwhelmed. It's also worth mentioning that in Wildstar, having a fairly simple DPS rotation freed up braincells to worry about all the various telegraph mechanics and poo poo to dodge in/out of. Trying to do a complex rotation WHILE doing complex maneuvering would pretty much leave me splattered all over the floor, which is one of the reasons I never did heroics in WoW.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 19:11
|
|
|
Pavlov posted:But like you said, it only has 8 slots. To me that's not a deck, that's a hand. I never played the game myself, but from what I saw of it, it didn't really seem to leave much room for many situational skills on your bar. Some skills are pretty long cooldowns too, which looked like it left people with one kind of short-ish rotation cast over and over. GW2 is extremely restrictive, because it tells you you need types of things and half your bar is static from the two weapons you use. GW1 let you put -anything-, with 1 elite maximum, in your 8 slots. It ruled. I really wish GW2 had 10 slots in that fashion
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 20:09
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:I may have had a bad experience with the engineer then. Weapon slots, plus utility spots, plus belt swaps.....I felt completely overwhelmed. GW2 was good in that it allowed playstyles of varying difficulty, but was bad in that it didn't make this immediately obvious to the player. I played an aforementioned piano-mesmer, because I liked how hectic it was, but you could also play a warrior with 5 slots filled with passives and never switch weapons, effectively having 5 skills. Actually build variety was one of GW2s greatest strengths. A lot of MMOs promise multiple viable class builds, but GW2 is one of the few I played that really delivered. I played a tank mesmer, and was still consistently one of the more useful people in my groups.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 20:14
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:I may have had a bad experience with the engineer then. Weapon slots, plus utility spots, plus belt swaps.....I felt completely overwhelmed. That's really just an engineer and elementalist thing
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2014 20:15
|
|
|
Jackard posted:That's really just an engineer and elementalist thing Is also why elementalist is the only class I can play. Others bring 15 skills, I have 25. Playing other classes is now just boring, no attunement dance no fun. But it was hell for the first 15 or so levels, getting used to it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 00:58
|
|
|
InternetJunky posted:After several weeks immersed in Archeage I have to say that despite the really bad stuff people seem to be focused on in regards to hacks, there are some amazing MMO design elements in there that have incredible potential. It isn't a new thing to eastern mmos as they often have some sort of escort item or npc option. Eastern MMOs try to cater to a large range of players from different nations with different goals. Vietnamese players love pvp if there is risk and reward but koreans tend to hate it. They prefer a nice place where they can be social and engage in a preset hierarchy where they know their position and role. You can go through eastern mmos and see a lot of escort type missions just to promote some sort of pvp or promote the idea of being a bandit or guard. In western mmos, most people have turned away from this because escort quests suck when it is a npc that moves slow, gets lost from bad pathing, or dies easily and also because pvp is a very niche thing in a western market. On a different note, eastern and western mmos both tend to have a grind but they are more upfront about it being the entire game and not just some hidden gear or faction grind at the end or even a cosmetic grind. Some of that boils down to different work and free time ethics between east and west.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 01:56
|
|
|
Third World Reggin posted:On a different note, eastern and western mmos both tend to have a grind but they are more upfront about it being the entire game and not just some hidden gear or faction grind at the end or even a cosmetic grind. Grithok the last China-MMO you suckered me into was so grindy it literally had an in-game bot you set up to continue grinding while you slept. I assume this was to convince their asian players to actually sleep instead of grinding until exaustion-death. Western MMOs have dumb grind, but eastern MMOs are a whole loving other level.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 04:14
|
|
|
I want there to be a Mexican mmo.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 04:17
|
|
|
Pavlov posted:Grithok the last China-MMO you suckered me into was so grindy it literally had an in-game bot you set up to continue grinding while you slept. I assume this was to convince their asian players to actually sleep instead of grinding until exaustion-death. Western MMOs have dumb grind, but eastern MMOs are a whole loving other level. A lot of eastern mmos have built in bot clients. It is part of their charm. People may bitch and complain about bots in archeage, but if the client gave you the chance most people would use it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 05:07
|
|
|
Hehe, I guess Progress Quest could be considered pretty charming as well.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 05:45
|
|
|
It is since it is the natural progression of these games. Just add a text box and other peoples names and you got the same thing as archeage.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 05:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:12 |
|
|
Aw that's not fair. You'd also have to give it a Cash Shop.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2014 05:53
|
|